What has people’s experience been in learning Android?
I’d be interested in how long it takes to get to the point where you’re writing your first app, and how the experience compares to learning some other programming API.
I know several professional programmers who have tried to learn Android and failed. Is it inherently more difficult or larger than you might expect? But there’s a survey here
http://www.infoq.com/news/2010/07/Mobile-Survey
that claims Android has the shortest learning curve of all smartphone platforms. I wonder
how the survey guys could have got such a perverse and unlikely result.
I have my own views and observations on this, which I’ll mention as a dialog develops. I don’t want to bias the discussion with my perspective at this point. Thanks.
Peter
To grasp the fundementals, all you need to do is know Java. However, what makes Android a little tougher (this is both a strength and a weakness) is that they have a fairly large API and it is a lot to take in and try to memorize. It helps to use a good IDE that has intellisense and autocomplete. Their powerful API is an advantage though because you can do a lot of things with Android. Things that may not even be possible on other mobile platforms.